Leave saving the world to the men? I don't think so.

The Occupy Wall Street Push Back

The hippies and the Business Men are fighting it out on my Facebook page.

Well, not really. They don't know each other. I seem to be friends with both types. Friends in a Facebook sense, that is. Some of these friends are random people from my sophomore math class that never bothered to talk to me back then, but now send me "Happy Birthday!!!!!!!" messages every year. Thank you, Facebook, for making me relive my miserable high school existence.

When I log into Facebook every morning, it's open class warfare. The Hippies have their posts about the 1%, although they seem very confused about who that 1% is and what they want from them. And the Business Men have their rants about how they work their ass off and how the Hippies should stop whining. Thank you, Facebook, for bringing class warfare into my office.

I thought I would post a couple of the links that are getting a lot of traffic on Facebook. I won't comment, but I will let you respond. Here's one that was posted not only by the random high school crowd, but by a few real people that I know:

17 thoughts on “The Occupy Wall Street Push Back”

There was a letter in Projo about the anger vs. BoA and what a bad idea it is for people to take their money out of BoA accounts because now BoA will get rid of jobs in RI. Morons. You take your money out of BoA and put it in another bank or credit union, and the jobs will move there. Wall Street and Big Business think they can hold everyone hostage, but what we have to do is show them they can’t.

On second thought, I’m sure plenty of people do actually think that way. However, I’m guessing that most of them who can write it down using proper English are also smart enough not to actually say it aloud or on paper.

YIKES!! To clarify, the person you know just posted that, but didn’t write it him/herself, yes?
I guess they just don’t care that things like credit default swaps and Bernie Madoff were their creation and literally ruined regular Americans? And they didn’t notice that the economy is in trouble directly because of something (potentially illegal) that THEY did?

Well, I’m hoping it’s a parody, ’cause, like the law school prof who couldn’t survive on 400K a year, it shows a complete tone-deaf defense of the 1% that would actually show that the folks are pretty stupid (even though they’re supposed to be smart).
I do think there’s a defense of the 1%. It’s the (top, anyway) of the list of the richest people in America. There are some hold overs on there, and some people who didn’t create any value for the “rest of us.” But there are men (and a few women) in there who changed the world for everyone. They’re rich ’cause they were able to capture a substantial portion of the value they created for the world (not because they traded baseball cards). Gates, Buffet, Ellison, Koch 1, Koch 2, Walton 1, Soros, Adelson, Walton 2, Walton 3, Walton 4, Bloomberg, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Paulson, Dell, Balmer, Mars 1-3, Allen, Knight, Icahn.
I can’t speak to the value offered by the traders (like Buffet, Soros, Paulson, Icahn, . . . .) though I do have warm feelings about Buffet and Soros. Except for the Mars’s & the Walton’s, everyone is newly super-rich. They are not enjoying the fruits of someone else’s creativity. Many of the created (or participated in the creation of) things that touch our lives (Ballmer, Gates, Bezos, Zuckberg, Brin, Page, Dell, Allen, Ellison, Bloomberg, Knight).
I’m not arguing for sainthood for any of them. But I think to deny that they created something that has value is wrong. I do think that there’s money churn with little value and that we need to tax differently. But I also think that some people with money actively produced value for the rest of us.

The financial crisis was not created by either CDS or Bernie Madoff (or high-speed trading or proprietary trading or the repeal of Glass-Steagall or securitization or what-have-you). It was created by “motherhood and apple pie” financial instruments, most notably low-downpayment mortgages and money market funds. I personally would love to see strong restrictions on both of these items, but (i) Congress would howl in rage and (ii) the 1% won’t suffer much if these items disappear.

I agree about the problems of low-downpayment mortgages, but that didn’t create the crisis. The crisis was created because all these mortgages were held by six or eight banks. And if some giant company with 600 quants running models makes/buys millions of really stupid loans, the probably is the person making the loans not the person taking out the loan.

whether its a parody or not, some people believe this. The problem is I reject a society where this guy or woman gets everything they want just because they are able to work 80 hours a week and eat my daughter’s 1st grade teacher for breakfast. I don’t want them teaching my kid, actually. I want a society where there’s a place for the guy with Down’s syndrome in my supermarket and the artist to make me gorgeous earrings that I pay good money for through doing my boring work that I’m pretty damn good at. I do think he/she is right though: we need wall street and capital to make retirement work and to make the artist able to build a workshop or run her store. But thing need to be a little fairer around here. And if you want to live like that, there’s a country called China or even Russia that will be happy to have you.